People of the Book (2 page)

“Me?” My voice actually squeaked. I don’t go in for false modesty: I’m great at what I do. But for a job like this, a once-in-a-lifetime career maker, there were at least a dozen people with more years on the clock and better connections in Europe. “Why not you?” I asked.

Amitai knew more about the Sarajevo Haggadah than anybody alive; he’d written monographs on it. I knew he would have loved this chance to handle the actual codex. He gave a deep sigh. “The Serbs have spent the past three years insisting that the Bosnians are fanatical Muslims, and finally, maybe, a few Bosnians have started to believe them. Seems the Saudis are big donors there now, and there was opposition to giving the job to an Israeli.”

“Oh, Amitai, I’m sorry….”

“It’s all right, Channa. I’m in good company. They didn’t want a German either. Of course, I suggested Werner first—no offense….” Since Herr Doktor Doktor Werner Maria Heinrich was not only my teacher, but also, after Amitai himself, the leading Hebrew manuscripts specialist in the world, I was hardly likely to take any. But Amitai explained that the Bosnians were still carrying a grudge against Germany for setting off the war in the first place, by recognizing Slovenia and Croatia. “And the UN doesn’t want an American because the U.S. Congress is always bad-mouthing UNESCO. So I thought you would be good, because who has any strong opinions about Australians? Also I told them that your technical skills are not bad.”

“Thanks for that ringing endorsement,” I said. And then, more sincerely, “Amitai, I’ll never forget this. Thank you, really.”

“You can repay me by making good documentation of the book, so at least we can print a beautiful facsimile. You’ll send me the pictures you make, yes, and a draft of your report, as soon as you can?”

His voice sounded so wistful l felt guilty about my own elation. But there was one question I had to ask him.

“Amitai, are there any issues of authenticity? You know the rumors, during the war…”

“No, we have no concerns there. The librarian Karaman and his boss, the director of the museum, have authenticated it beyond doubt. Your job is merely technical at this point.”

Technical. We’ll see about that, I thought to myself. A lot of what I do
is
technical; science and craftsmanship that anyone with decent intelligence and good fine-motor skills can be taught to do. But there is something else, too. It has to do with an intuition about the past. By linking research and imagination, sometimes I can think myself into the heads of the people who made the book. I can figure out who they were, or how they worked. That’s how I add my few grains to the sandbox of human knowledge. It’s what I love best about what I do. And there were so many questions about the Sarajevo Haggadah. If I could answer just one of them…

I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I threw on my sweats and went out, through the nighttime streets still faintly sour with the mingled stink of spewed beer and deep-fryer fat, down to the beach, where the air blows, clean and briny, over half a planet’s worth of uninterrupted ocean. Because it was autumn, and a midweek night, there was hardly anyone around. Just a few drunks, slumped by the wall of the surf club, and a pair of lovers, entwined on a beach towel. No one to notice me. I started walking along the edge of the foam, luminous against the lacquered darkness of the sand. Before I knew it, I was running and skipping, dodging the breakers like a child.

That was a week ago. In the days following, that feeling of exhilaration had been gradually buried under visa applications, reissued airline tickets, UN red tape, and a thick dollop of nerves. As I staggered down the stairs from the plane to the tarmac under the weight of my case, I had to keep reminding myself that this was exactly the kind of assignment I lived for.

I had barely a second to take in the mountains, rising all around us like the rim of a giant bowl, and then a blue-helmeted soldier—tall and Scandinavian-looking—leaped from the middle vehicle and seized my bag, hurling it into the rear of the van.

“Steady!” I said. “There’s delicate equipment in there!” The soldier’s only reply was to grab me by the arm and propel me into the backseat, slamming the door and jumping in front alongside the driver. The automatic locks clicked down with a definitive
thunk,
and the driver gunned the engine.

“Well, this is a first for me,” I said, trying for some wan levity. “Book conservators don’t usually have much call to travel in armored cars.” There was no response from the soldier or the thin, drawn civilian hunched over the wheel of the immense vehicle, his head pulled into his shoulders like a tortoise. Through the tinted glass the devastated city passed in a blur of shrapnel-splashed buildings. The vans drove fast, swerving around cavernous potholes made by mortar shells and bumping over bitumen shredded by the tracks of armored vehicles. There wasn’t much traffic. Most people were on foot; gaunt, exhausted-looking people, coats pulled tight against the chill of a spring that hadn’t quite arrived. We passed an apartment block that looked like the dollhouse I’d had as a girl, where the entire front wall lifted off to reveal the rooms within. In this block, the wall had been peeled away by an explosion. But like my dollhouse, the exposed rooms were furnished. As we sped by, I realized that people were somehow still living there, their only protection a few sheets of plastic billowing in the wind. But they’d done their laundry. It flapped from lines strung between the twisted spikes of reinforcing bars that protruded from the shattered concrete.

I thought they’d take me straight to see the book. Instead, the day was consumed by endless, tedious meetings, first with every UN official who’d ever had a thought about a cultural matter, then with the director of the Bosnian museum, then with a bunch of government officials. I doubt I’d have gotten much sleep anyway, given the anticipation of starting work, but the dozen or so cups of strong Turkish coffee I’d been served in the course of the day hadn’t helped. Maybe that’s why my hands were still shaking.

There was a burst of static from the police radios. Suddenly all the people were up on their feet: the police, the guards, Sajjan. The bank official shot the door bolts and a whole lot more guards entered in a sort of flying wedge. At the center was a thin young man in faded blue jeans. The slacker from the museum, probably, who’d kept us all waiting. But I didn’t have time to be irritated with him, because he was cradling a metal box. When he set it down on the bench I saw it was sealed in several places with stamped wax and adhesive papers. I passed him my scalpel. He broke the seals and eased open the lid. He unwrapped several sheets of silk paper. And then he handed me the book.

II

A
S MANY TIMES
as I’ve worked on rare, beautiful things, that first touch is always a strange and powerful sensation. It’s a combination between brushing a live wire and stroking the back of a newborn baby’s head.

No conservator had handled this manuscript for a century. I had the forms positioned, ready. I hesitated for just a second—a Hebrew book, therefore spine to the right—and laid it in the cradling foam.

Until you opened it, the book was nothing that an untrained eye would look twice at. It was small, for one thing, convenient for use at the Passover dinner table. Its binding was of an ordinary nineteenth-century style, soiled and scuffed. A codex as gorgeously illustrated as this one would originally have had an elaborate binding. You don’t make filet mignon then serve it on a paper plate. The binder might have used gold leaf or silver tooling, maybe inlays of ivory or pearl shell. But this book had probably been rebound many times in its long life. The only one we knew about for sure, because it had been documented, was the last time, in Vienna in the 1890s. Unfortunately, the book had been terribly mishandled in that instance. The Austrian binder had cropped the parchment heavily and discarded the old binding—something no one, especially not a professional working for a major museum—would ever do anymore. It was impossible to say what information might have been lost at that time. He had rebound the parchments in simple cardboard covers with an inappropriate Turkish printed floral paper decoration, now faded and discolored. Only the corners and spine were calfskin, and this was dark brown and flaking away, exposing the edge of the gray board beneath.

I ran my middle finger lightly along the cracked corners. These I would consolidate over the coming days. As my finger followed the edges of the board, I noticed something unexpected. The binder had made a pair of channels and a set of small holes in the board edge to accept a pair of clasps. It was usual for books of parchment to have clasps, to hold the pages flat. Yet there were no clasps on this binding. I made a note to myself to investigate this.

Moving the forms to support the spine, I opened the cover and leaned close to examine the torn endpapers. I would mend these with wheat paste and shreds of matching linen paper. I could see at once that the linen cords the Viennese binder had used were frayed, barely holding. That meant I would have to take the quires apart and restitch them. Then I breathed deeply and turned the page to the parchment of the manuscript itself. This was what mattered; this was what would disclose what four hard years had done to a survivor of five centuries.

The snow light flared on brightness. Blue: intense as a midsummer sky, obtained from grinding precious lapis lazuli carried by camel caravan all the way from the mountains of Afghanistan. White: pure, creamy, opaque. Less glamorous, more complicated than the blue. At that time it would still have been made according to the method discovered by ancient Egyptians. You cover lead bars with the dregs of old wine and seal them up in a shed full of animal dung. I’d done it once, in my mother’s greenhouse in Bellevue Hill. She’d had a load of manure delivered, and I couldn’t resist. The acid in the vinegary wine converts lead to its acetate, which in turn combines with the carbon dioxide released by the dung to make basic white lead carbonate, PbCO
₃
. My mother pitched a fit about it, of course. Said she couldn’t stand to go near her bloody prize orchids for weeks.

I turned a page. More dazzle. The illuminations were beautiful, but I didn’t allow myself to look at them as art. Not yet. First I had to understand them as chemicals. There was yellow, made of saffron. That beautiful autumn flower,
Crocus sativus Linnaeus,
each with just three tiny precious stigmas, had been a prized luxury then and remained one, still. Even if we now know that the rich color comes from a carotene, crocin, with a molecular structure of 44 carbon, 64 hydrogen, and 24 oxygen, we still haven’t synthesized a substitute as complex and as beautiful. There was malachite green, and red; the intense red known as worm scarlet—
tola’at shani
in Hebrew—extracted from tree-dwelling insects, crushed up and boiled in lye. Later, when alchemists learned how to make a similar red from sulfur and mercury, they still named the color “little worm”—
vermiculum
. Some things don’t change: we call it vermilion even today.

Change. That’s the enemy. Books do best when temperature, humidity, the whole environment, stay the same. You could hardly get more dramatic changes than this book had been through: moved under extreme difficulties and without preparation or precaution, exposed to wild swings of temperature. I’d been worried that the parchment might have shrunk, the pigments cracked and lifted. But the colors had held fast, as pure and as vivid as the day the paint was applied. Unlike the leaf on the spine, which had flaked away, the burnished gold of the illuminations was fresh and blazing. The gilder of five hundred years ago had definitely had a better grasp of his trade than the more modern Viennese bookbinder. There was silver leaf also. This had oxidized and turned dark gray, as you would expect.

“Will you be replacing that?” It was the thin young man from the museum. He was pointing at a distinct area of tarnish. He was standing too close. Because parchment is flesh, human bacteria can degrade it. I moved my shoulder so that he had to withdraw his hand and take a step backward.

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not.” I did not look up.

“But you’re a restorer; I thought…”

“Conservator,” I corrected. The last thing I wanted right then was a long discussion on the philosophy of book conservation. “Look,” I said, “you’re here; I’m instructed that you have to be here, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interrupt my work.”

“I understand,” he said, his voice gentle after my abrasiveness. “But you must also understand: I am the
kustos,
the book is in my care.”

Kustos.
It took a minute to sink in. I turned then, and stared at him. “
You
can’t be Ozren Karaman? The one who saved the book?”

The UN rep, Sajjan, sprang up, all apologies. “I am sorry, I should have made the introduction. But you were so anxious to get to work. I—Dr. Hanna Heath, please may I present Dr. Ozren Karaman, chief librarian of the National Museum and professor of librarianship at the National University of Bosnia.”

“I—Sorry, that was rude of me,” I said. “I expected that you’d be much older, to be chief curator of such a major collection.” I also didn’t expect a person in that position to look quite so disheveled. He was wearing a scuffed leather jacket over a crumpled white T-shirt. His jeans were frayed. His hair—wild, curly, neither combed nor cut—flopped over a pair of glasses that were mended in the middle with a bit of duct tape.

He raised an eyebrow. “You yourself, of course, being so very advanced in years, would have every reason to think that.” He kept a perfectly straight face as he said this. I guessed he was about thirty, like me. “But I would be very pleased, Dr. Heath, if you could spare a moment to say what you have in mind to do.” He shot Sajjan a glance as he said this, and in it I could read a volume. The UN thought it was doing Bosnia a favor, funding the work so that the haggadah could be properly displayed. But when it comes to national treasures, no one wants outsiders calling the shots. Ozren Karaman clearly felt he’d been sidelined. The last thing I wanted was to get involved in any of that. I was here to care for a book, not some librarian’s bruised ego. Still, he had a right to know why the UN had chosen someone like me.